December 2010

A Brief Notice for Wireless Operators

The sponsors of this event authorize the following Official Notice to be broadcast on the wireless:

On Saturday, December 11, a local tech collective,? UBEW, will be hosting an unusual evening of food, auction, and performance.? This historic costume benefit will feature an elegant three-course dinner, a semi-silent auction of unusual items, stimulating music, and an exhibition boxing bout between Nikola Tesla and Tom Edison. At the Pacific Cultural Center, 1307 Seabright Ave in Santa Cruz, at 6pm. For more info, go to UBEW DOT ORG.

Tent tethered among jackpine and blue-
bells. Lacewings rise from rock
incubators. Wild geese flying north.
And I can’t remember who I am supposed to be.I want to learn how to purr. Abandon
myself, have mistresses in maidenhair
fern, own no tomorrow nor yesterday:
a blank shimmering space forward and
back. I want to think with my belly.
I want to name all the stars animals
flowers birds rocks in order to forget
them, start over again. I want to
wear the seasons, harlequin, become
ancient and etched by weather. I
want to snow pulse, ruminating
ungulating, pebble at the bottom of the
abyss, candle burning darkness rather
than flame. I want to peer at things,
shameless, observe the unfastening,
that stripping of shape by dusk.
I want to sit in the meadow a rotten
stump pungent with slimemold, home
for pupae and grubs, concentric rings
collapsing into the passacaglia of
time. I want to crawl inside someone
and hibernate one entire night with
no clocks to wake me, thighs fragrant
loam. I want to melt. I want to swim
naked with an otter. I want to turn
inside out, exchange nuclei with the
Sun. Toward the mythic kingdom of
summer I want to make blind motion,
using my ribs as a raft, following
the spiders as they set sail on their
tasseled shining silk. Sometimes
even a single feather’s enoughto fly.

“The Buddha said that his path to awakening was one of rebellion, a subversive path that is against greed, against hatred and against delusion. In order to awaken, he taught that we have to travel against the norm of society and against our own self-centered tendencies? he (called) the path he had traveled and that all who wished to follow ?Patisotagami? ???, which literally translates as ?Against The Stream?.”

She’s a quiet clapper in the bell of the prairie,
a girl who likes to be alone.
Today, she’s hiked four miles down
ravine’s low cool blueness.
Bending under a barbed wire, she’s in grass fields.
She’s at the edge of the great plains.
Wise to openness, she finds it a familiar place.
Her clothes swell like wheat bread.

When she returns to her parents’ house,
the foxtails and burrs have come home, too.
The plants seem intent on living in the new ground.
She’s the carrier. “Carrier” is a precision
learned in summer’s biology class.
She likes to think of ripening seeds,
a cargo inside the bellies of flying birds.
Birds like red-winged blackbirds who skim the air
and land, alert on their cattail stalks.

They allow her a silent manner.
They go about their red-winged business
of crying to each other, dipping their beaks
into the swampy stand of green.
The stiller she is, the more everything moves
in the immense vocabulary of being.